Motion Array
Enabling seamless collaboration for video creators.
Services
Design strategy
User research
Market research
Data analysis
Interaction design
Interface design
Design system
Deliverables
Design roadmap
Product spec
Product tracking plan
0 to 1 product development
Team involved
Rebecca Visser
Content Director
Cole Vineyard
VP of Marketing
Albert Cloete
Engineer
Louise Lista
Engineer
Lemuel Flores
Engineer
Introduction
If you’ve read my main Motion Array case study, you’ve likely read a bit about my tenure there. If not, I highly recommend it, but also, here is a brief overview. In 2018, I joined Motion Array, a platform for content creators, providing unlimited downloads of professional video assets.
Motion Array had their initial growth spur that slowed down in 2018 and they brought me in to help them understand what can be done to resume and surpass their initial trajectory. After doing a deep discovery or the product, the company and user challenges, we’ve made some adjustments to the product and the overall offering.
This included developing two new products that would be included on the subscription - The Portfolio, and The Review, which you’re going to read more about in this case study.
Uncovering the challenges
During the discovery phase that we conducted to uncover opportunities for growth of the platform, we found that due to the nature of the subscription, many users only activated their subscription when they needed to download assets. Given that the company only offered assets, users didn’t see the value in keeping the long term subscription.
Additionally, while talking to our members as well as contributors, we found a few deeper issues that they had with their workflow. We learned that they had issues getting feedback from stakeholders on their work, as the existing way of getting feedback was slow and frustrating for both sides.
Multiple factors contributed to this but it seemed to be an industry wide trend. Video files are often very large and hard to share, multiple stakeholders are providing feedback at different times through different mediums. It's hard to compile the feedback and understand exactly what clients want to adjust.
The opportunity
The feedback from our network aligned perfectly to what we were trying to do and it gave way to the new era of the product. We realized the potential and came up with the idea of creating and all-in-one platform for video creators, offering the full workflow from finding assets for projects, to getting feedback and finally publishing the work.
The first product in the new line up that would allow that was The Review - a tool that allows creators to quickly share their videos with clients and their own team and get precise, frame accurate feedback.
The organization
One of the main problems creators have with sharing work and gathering feedback is organization. Different parts of the same project are shared through multiple different channels which leads to scattered feeedback.
With The Review we solved that by organizing work in one place. Every creator has their workspace where they can create projects for every client or campaign they're working on.
Additionally, we introduced statuses for each video in the project, making it clear what stage the project is in, whether it's being worked on, waiting for the review or done. This helps teams get aligned and understand how the project is progressing.
The collaboration
With scattered feedback, the collaboration is suffering. Stakeholders can't get aligned and decisions are taking a long time.
The Review allows adding unlimited collaborators to projects. This helps teams work together on a project and provide feedback transparently.
The comments are frame accurate, supporting precision and comments are threaded, meaning ideas can unfold and be discussed in one place and not across multiple channels.
And finally, mentioning people helps streamline the conversations and adds additional clarity to the feedback.
The precision
To improve the precision of feedback, we introduced several key features. One of the most important was version control, as many users emphasized the need for clear differentiation between various versions of their work. We made it easy to compare different versions side by side, streamlining the review process for both creators and their clients.
Sometimes the feedback needs to be requested for a specific sequence, not a full video. We introduced the selection share, that allowed users to control exactly what parts of the video they want to get comments on.
Precision is crucial in the video industry, especially with quick sequences where explaining feedback can be challenging. To address this, we made the tool frame-accurate, enabling users to place comments on individual frames down to the smallest detail. This ensures feedback is precise and directly linked to the exact moment in the video that needs attention.
Outcome
Releasing this product gave us a boost in subscription length immediately and we saw subscriptions average lifetime increase and the churn going down.
Eventually, this product together with the other initiatives we brought to life helped us achieve 185% growth year over year and the marketplace grew to 600k products and over 9m users.
The subscription offered a significantly better long term value, extending subscription length by 16x and drastically reducing churn.
During my second year at Motion Array, we've achieved and exceeded the goals we set and the company was acquired by Artlist for $65M.
